Monthly Archives: February 2016
Specticaled Owl
Specticaled Owl, Rio Santiago Lodge, Honduras
Rio Santiago Lodge in Honduras is where you go to photograph hummingbirds, but over the past year the Lodge has had several attractions besides the hummers. Just after I was there in February 2015, a newly fledged Specticaled Owl moved into the area behind the lodge, and beginning last fall was seen regularly within a short hike of the Lodge. The bird is now just about a year old, and can still be found, most days. The guides at the lodge keep track of its comings and goings and generally know about where to look…consequently it is now perhaps the most photographed Specticaled Owl in the world :).
And what an amazing bird it is. Beautiful in all the ways any owl is…but spectacular in its facial pattern. On the day I was there, it was somewhat obscured by branches…but still an amazing sight.
Nikon P900 at 1800mm equivalent field of view. 1/30th @ ISO 800 @ f6.3. (Pretty good for hand-held at 1/30th second.) Processed in Lightroom.
Female Black-headed Trogon
Female Black-headed Trogon, Cuero y Salado NWR, Honduras
You never know what you will see from the boats at the Cuero y Salado National Wildlife Refuge in Honduras. You reach Cuero y Salado via a short bus ride from the Lodge at Pico Bonito to the train station in La Union, where you board the century old, narrow gauge, one car and an engine, banana train for the ride out to the Refuge on the coast. From the Refuge Visitor Center you take small motor boats out into the three channels at the mouth of the Cuero y Salado rivers, up into the mangroves and out toward the beach. Along the way, you see a wide variety of birds and wildlife native to the habitats. This is a female Black-headed Trogon which was sitting on a branch all but overhanging a narrow channel through the mangroves.
We only regularly get one Trogon, the Elegant, in the US, right down along the Mexican border in the sky-islands of Southern Arizona…but there are more than a dozen in Central America. The Black-headed is one of the most widely distributed and most common.
Even though the guides are expert in their handling of the boats, and make every effort to get you and boat still enough for a good view and even a decent shot, shooting from a moving boat is real challenge…and only possible thanks to the excellent image stabilization built into most lenses and long-lens superzoom point and shoot cameras these days. For the shots from the boat, I switched the Nikon P900 to “Active Image Stabilization” which compensates for both small vibrations due to hand holding, and for larger motions when you are shooting from a moving platform. It worked very well.
Nikon P900 at 1800mm equivalent field of view. 1/500th @ ISO 400 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom.
Woodnympth at the feeder
Crowned Woodnmypth, Rio Santiago Lodge, Honduras
Part of what makes Rio Santiago Lodge a great place for Hummingbird photography is how close you can get to the feeders. If you sit on the terrace under the thatched roof of the open-air restaurant, there are feeders hanging just above your head. Moving around in the restaurant is a challenge because if you are not careful you will bump your head on a feeder and get showered in sugar water (or get skewered by a Long-billed Hermit or Saberwing :). Even on the open slope above the lodge where most of the feeders are, you can sit within 8 feet of an active feeder. That makes shots like this possible. This is another Crowned Woodnmpth using one of the home-made feeders off the deck above the lodge.
Nikon P610 at 1440mm equivalent. Shutter preferred. 1/320th @ ISO 1000 @ f6.5. Processed in Lightroom.
Just a Blue-crowned Motmot
Blue-crowned Motmot, the Lodge at Pico Bonito, Honduras
Just another Blue-crowned Motmot. Okay, just because the Blue-crowned Motmot is the most common of the Motmots at the elevations around the Lodge at Pico Bonito (and even up at Panacam Lodge at the edge of the cloud forest), does not mean that it is not a spectacular bird. It was, indeed, almost the very first bird I saw at Panacam, and among the first I saw at Pico Bonito. Still. Under any other circumstances, it would be a knock-out bird. It has the long weird tail, the bright blues and greens, the deep rust of the breast, the red eye, and a sexy name: Motmot! This bird was along the entry road at Pico Bonito, in the trees overhanging, and we walked under it on our way to try to photograph Lovely Cotingas. I found myself at the back of the group by the time I finished photographing it. No one else took a second look. Birders!
Nikon P900 at various exposures as the light changed between shots, and at various focal lengths from 1000mm to 2000mm. Processed in Lightroom and assembled in Coolage.
Crowned Woodnymth
Crowned Woodnymth, Rio Santiago Lodge, Honduras
This is a collage of two shots of the Crowned-Woodnymth Hummingbird taken at Rio Santiago Lodge, in the high rainforest of Honduras. Rio Santiago maintains nearly a hundred feeders on the slope above the lodge, and on the terrace by the outdoor restaurant, and attracts too many hummingbirds to count, During the height of the season, June and July, they go through 435 pounds of sugar a week. I have only visited in February, but I will be back in late June this year. The best part of Rio Santiago, however, is not the feeders, but the abundance of natural perches and blooming flowers, which makes hummingbird photography there, as far as I am concerned, a unique experience.
The Crowned Woodnymth, which was, until recently, called the Violet-crowned Woodnymth, is one of the most colorful of Central American hummingbirds. Blue, green, violet, and black shimmer in almost any light…each so intense that it just about overloads the digital sensor in your camera. I am not sure why they took the violet from its crown. I suspect it is a relumping of some of the closely related crowned woodnympths, which were once considered a single species, then split, and now lumped back together again. This collage shows a bit of the attitude of the bird too. It is a feisty little thing, well capable of seizing its share of the sugar water. It is also one of the more common of Honduran Hummers, so you see a lot of them, both at the Lodge at Pico Bonito, and at the Rio Santiago Lodge.
Two frames from the Nikon P610 at 1100mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/320th @ ISO 1400 @ f5.6. Processed in Lightroom and assembled in Coolage. If you are interested in joining me in June at the Lodge at Pico Bonito and Rio Santiago Lodge, check out the information on the trip at Point and Shoot Nature Photographer.
Humming in the rain. Happy Sunday!
Rufous-tailed Hummingbird. The Lodge at Pico Bonito, Honduras
“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus
On my last morning at the Lodge at Pico Bonito in Honduras, while I waited for the bus to the airport, I spent 3 hours around the Lodge in the rain…mostly shooting from the covered decks and walkways. I made the occasional foray out into the grounds with my umbrella when something worthy presented itself and tempted me to chase it (the Toucans for instance). This Rufous-tailed Hummingbird was using one of the flowers right off the deck at the restaurant for a perch. It was a favorite perch…I saw Rufous-tailed, Crowned Wood-nymth, Jocobin, and Saberwing use it over the course of the three hours. Despite the subdued light, there is a lot to see in this image. You get a bird-in-the-hand view of the feather texture. You can see where the angle of the light catches color from the feathers under the neck, and what they look like when the light is not refracting through them. I love the little drops of water on the head, and the rain streaks caught in the back and foreground. I love the clarity and the liquid perfection of the eye.
The shot has an intimate feeling to it…I think because it captures something shared: a shared attitude. Both the the hummer and I were enduring the rain…making the most of a “bad” situation…or rather transforming a potentially bad situation into a good one by the persistence of a positive attitude. A little rain is not going to stop either of us from doing what needs to be done…and, in my case at least, from doing what I enjoy doing. It would be ungenerous of me to think less of the bird. I suspect, from the look of him, that he was enjoying the morning too. It is a shared moment of enjoyment…in the rain. Intimate.
I would like to think that God looks into my rainy days in the same way…enjoying my enjoyment…sharing an intimate moment. It would be ungenerous of me tho think otherwise of God, don’t you think? And when your eye is generous, God is always the third in any intimate encounter between two creatures. Enjoying the enjoyment! Or that is what I think.
Happy Sunday!
Stripe-throated Hermit
Stripe-throated Hermit, Rio Santiago, Honduras
The tiny Stripe-throated Hermit, which can, in comparison to the other hummers around it (and especially to its much larger hermit counterpart…the Long-billed Hermit), appear not much bigger than a large bumble bee, is indeed one of the smallest hummingbirds in Central America…one of the smallest hummingbirds anywhere for that matter. It does not stand out in coloration either…rufous brown over most of its body, with just a hint of rarely seen greenish iridescence over its head and shoulders, and a white-bordered black bandit’s mask on the face. The stripes on the throat that give it its name are often so faint as to be barely visible. What it lacks in size and flash though, it makes up in aerobatics. It feeds on the nectar of flowers in flight, and often, as in these images, pierces the base of flowers to extract nectar it could not otherwise reach. It is a fun hummingbird to watch, and often appears to prefer flower feeding, even when there are many human-tended sugar-water feeders around. You have to admire its independence.
Nikon P610 at 1440mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred @ 1/320th. ISO 1000 at f6.5. Processed in Lightroom and assembled in Coolage.
Bare-throated Tiger Heron
The Bare-throated Tiger Heron is relatively common around the waters of the Cuero y Salado National Wildlife Refuge in Honduras. I have been there twice, a year apart, and seen it on both trips. This year we saw several. This was my best view this year, but it was a very difficult shot. I was in a moving boat, in the first place, and the bird was highlighted by the sun against the dark background of foliage. This is when I am thankful to be a Point and Shoot photographer. The Active Image Stabilization on the Nikon P900 handled the boat motion (once I got the bird in the frame) and the auto exposure managed to keep enough detail in the highlighted bird so that I could bring it out in Lightroom for what is, overall, a very satisfying image. It is a strange bird, with the large patch of yellow skin exposed at the throat.
Nikon P900 at 400mm equivalent field of view. 1/125th @ ISO 220 @ f5. Processed in Lightroom.
Black-cowled Oriole
Black-cowled Oriole, the Lodge at Pico Bonito, Honduras
Another gift of the flowering and fruiting trees off the deck at the Lodge at Pico Bonito in Honduras: this Black -cowled Oriole put in an appearance just after breakfast one morning. Again, this is a bird of slightly higher elevations, forced down by unseasonably cool temperatures in the lower cloud forest almost straight above the lodge. We only saw it once…but once was enough!
Nikon P900 at 2000mm equivalent field of view. 1/200th @ ISO 400 @ f6.5. Processed in Lightroom.
Rufous-winged Tanager
Rufous-winged Tanager, The Lodge at Pico Bonito, Honduras
On our first morning at the Lodge at Pico Bonito in Honduras, after ordering breakfast at the restaurant, someone spotted a mixed feeding flock moving through the trees just off the deck. We, of course, all leaped up and ran for binos and cameras. Olive-backed Euphonias were in the lead, but the flock also contained a Shinny Honeycreeper and a Rufous-winged Tanager, both birds of higher elevations and not common on the grounds of Pico Bonito, as well as Black-cowled Oriole. What a treat! We were still busy with them when the waiter came looking for us to tell us our breakfasts were on the table. 🙂 Now that is service! and that is what makes the Lodge at such a great birding and photography destination. It is not like that every morning, of course, but it is like that often enough to make it simply wonderful!
Nikon P900 at 2000mm equivalent. 1/320th @ ISO 400 @ f6.5. Processed in Lightroom.